Falen Johnson, Producer and Host of Buffy, Sits Down With Bingeworthy
This 5-part podcast spotlights Buffy Saint-Marie, one of the most prolific singer-songwriters of our day, but also tells a bigger story at the same time
Hello and happy International Women’s Day! Thank you for finding this work and welcome to the 42 new subscribers this month. What a treat to have this publishing day actually land on March 8…this date pushed me to make sure that I got it right.
Recently I made a list of shows and interviews that I will cover in the next half of 2023. It’s an exciting list that promises lots of amazing stories, and also some great insights from people doing fantastic things in the audio industry, TBA!
But publishing *on* IWD raised the bar for me to find a series about a woman who embodies all of what it means to celebrate women on this day. I discovered that finding this match, out there in audio land, was not a slam dunk.
It forced me to think about how many true crime podcasts highlight the unsolved murder of a woman. And it sparked me to look deeply at all the stories out there that have an obvious bias, towards [white] male-led stories, histories, ideas, inventions…
Yesssss; there are plenty of female-led podcasts, about women, for women…but to specifically find one that celebrates a woman as a superstar hero who has succeeded and triumphed in a world of men…is…well…less easy to find.
I’m happy to report that I found one for you, and it’s about a woman that is certainly well-known, but deserves all the accolades (and more) shouted in her direction: Buffy Saint-Marie.
If you grew up in the 1970s, you might remember Buffy as a regular on Sesame Street, palling around with Kermit and Big Bird, breast-feeding her son. If you’re a folk-music junkie, you’ll likely be able to sing along to her best-known songs: Universal Soldier, or Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee …. if you’re an Elvis fan, you know her work (even if you didn’t realize she wrote one of his biggest hits) Until It’s Time For You To Go.
But as Falen Johnson, producer and host of the show says, if you’re Indigenous, she’s just always been there. As a presence, a conscious, an inspiration, and an ideal.
Buffy Saint-Marie was born in Canada in 1941, likely on the Piapot Reserve, in Qu’Appelle Valley in Southern Saskatchewan. But she was “adopted out,” which is a polite way of saying that she was sent away to live with a white family as part of a program that would later be called The Sixties Scoop. Buffy ended up with a family outside Boston, Massachusetts, and was raised there.
Buffy was never formally trained as a musician; she taught herself as a young child using her imagination as her guide. After attending university, she began to play the coffee house circuit, along with the likes of Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan. She was, as they say, the right person, in the right place, at the right time.
But her life was anything but easy or straightforward. Despite a million potential setbacks, Buffy thrived. As she became famous, she used her platform to raise awareness for many issues and causes. And along the way, Buffy has become a global icon.
This podcast series celebrates her life and her legacy, but it also pushes you to consider what it means to know her history—an Indigenous woman who was forced out of her home and culture, and then later, blacklisted by the American government—and what it means to listen to a story as we sit on our colonial lands and unceded territories.
This series is as much a biopic as it is a voice for action and solidarity. And in that way, the host and producer, Falen Johnson, raises the bar for how to present a biography that is also a history.
The narration is scripted to draw you into the life story of Buffy, but then also the political reality of what it meant to be Buffy back in the day, and then connect that all means with our present day.
For me, this felt like an “active listen;” meaning that the act of listening to this story also required me to challenge some of the status quo. What it left me with was a feeling of connection and a common purpose, and some great facts and connections about a superstar music hero that I have long admired, but didn’t know much about.
If I ask myself how it arrived at that mark, I think I have the answer: Buffy (the podcast) managed to turn backstory into an enduring essay that connects with the listener, supported by amazing access, archive, and music that has endured through the ages as timeless, and essential.
The following is a transcription of an interview with Falen Johnson. It has been edited for length and clarity.
Samantha Hodder: What was the timeline of when you were working on this project?
Falen Johnson: The [CBC] approached me with the idea to host it. I guess it would have the late fall of 2021. And so and then it was go time.
SH: You must have really pushed the gas on that one to get it out by June [2022].
FJ: Yeah, definitely. We spent a full month writing the episode treatments, of what we thought it was going to be…and then it all changed anyway…you look back and wonder why you banged your head for so long trying to make pieces fit together when you know it was all going to change anyway!
One of the conversations that we had early on was about not doing a bio podcast that had famous talking heads. We wanted [it] to be intimate, because, you know, she's in her 80s, and she is a force. She has a narrative and a story that she tells and things [then way] that she wants to talk [them]. She really doesn't like to look back. I think people have asked her to look back on her life a lot, because it's so amazing and influential, and so many just like wild things happened [to her] … but she really wants to craft a forward-looking narrative a lot of the time.
You'll ask her a question about, you know, what was it like playing at The Gaslight in the 60s in Greenwich Village? And she'll say, “Well, it was great. But, you know, the thing I told them…”
It took some doing to get her to sit in those moments with us. So I think but I think we did get a lot of those beautiful, intimate moments.
We could have probably gone after some larger, you know, stars, [big] names. But we wanted her first boyfriend, and we wanted her childhood best friend, because those are the people who have just a completely different understanding of who she is.
But we also had the great fortune of CBC archives. CBC was documenting her career from the earliest days. We could use that archival audio to tell a story that other [non-CBC] media outlets couldn't because we had just had access to so many things.
SH: I'm really struck by the fact that this story, and this series, really works on multiple levels. It's a biography; it's also a history, and a music history…but it's also a very strong POV with a very strong political statement. Was that your vision that you brought to it? Or [did you have to] fight against [CBC] to make that happen?
FJ: When they first approached me to host, they were like: Who do you think could host this?
And I was thinking, totally a musician…because, who am I to tell [this] story? And they're [CBC] was like: “Well, we were thinking you.”
So then we had to come up with the question of: Why me? Why am I the one telling the story? We really tried to find a moment….[And then CBC asked:] Do you remember the first time you heard her? Do you have a special memory of her? And I was like: No, she's just always been here…I don't remember a time before, because there just wasn't. And that's how it is for us, for a lot of people.
And then it made me think about what a privilege [it is] to be in a place where somebody has been clearing a path for me for as long as I've been alive … without me knowing it. So then that became the angle in. We're talking about this, but we're actually talking about [is that]… and how this expands out and touches all of us, specifically Indigenous people.
SH: And that must have been like a bit of a door opening for you in some ways, to be able to articulate that, and to and then to have this giant platform to stand on and shout it to the rooftops.
FJ: Oh, absolutely. The other work that I do with the CBC is my history podcast, I'm passionate about history. [But here was something from] my perspective, about Buffy's life, in the context of time. You can't separate those things from [Buffy’s] life and her work and everything she's done.
SH: I certainly learned a lot about her [career] and I’m shocked at how [much of a] cornerstone she is and how much she was in the right place at the right time. She knew everyone! She got Joni Mitchell's career going. Bob Dylan got her first gig at The Gaslight, Elvis recorded her song…you can't get more superstar than that. Was this new to you? Or did you was this your research [discover this]?
FJ: There are some things that I knew about her. There have been a couple of biographies written about her, one by Blair Stonechild and one by Andrea Warner, who also worked on doc about her.
But there were some things I didn't know. And then it's also that thing about Indigenous country, where sometimes you know something, but you're not sure how you know.
I have to say, the extent of the abuse as a child. I didn't know that about that. I knew she had I know she had an abusive ex-husband, but I didn't know the full extent of that story. Once I started reading the biographies, and listening to the interviews…. it was a different thing to be able to listen to tape, archival tape, and to know what was going on.
SH: Yeah, right. [Now you had] the context for it.
FJ: And to hear her voice, [it sounds] different in different eras…you knew something was going on, you could hear it.
And it's also so much memory that you're trying to make the pieces line up so that they make sense to the ear, and the timeline and. [Plus], people are imperfect and memories are imperfect. So sometimes you get conflicting things and you have to really dig in and try and like, figure it out. And it [can get] get tricky.
SH: Were you star-struck?
FJ: Our first in-person interview would have been end of November 2021, right before Omicron hit. She came to Toronto, into the CBC [building]. There was no one in the building…it was impossible to get a studio, so we had this very strange studio setup.
So it was Buffy, myself, one of our producers, Leah, and our one of our audio guys, Austin, and Buffy. She came in and I was nervous. I was mega nervous, I think more so the pressure because we knew we weren't going to be able to get her in person a lot because she lives in Hawaii, and CBC wouldn't send me to Hawaii, which was too bad!
But it's mostly because I knew we didn't have a lot of time with her and we needed to get the tape. I remember one of our other producers, Zoe and I, spent hours and hours crafting this cue line. If she goes here, we go here; if she says this, then we follow with this…it was almost like a choose your own adventure.
I don't advise interviewing like that, because she walked into the room and she said; “Yeah, so I saw you guys wanted to talk to me about a bunch of other stuff….but, you know, people hear stuff about the old days, and they just, you know, go click, they turn it off. It's so boring. Can we just talk about some new stuff?”
And I literally picked up my cue line, slid it to the side, and just said, “Yep.”
As two Indigenous women sitting down chatting, there's just a different there's a different relationship at play already. And to not nourish that will do a disservice to the interview. So I, I just slid the cue line out of the way and I let her go, and I just tried to keep up.
SH: Yeah I can imagine … I saw her play in 2015, so she would have been not quite 75, and she's high kicking in three-inch heels, for a two-hour set. No breaks, full on. It was so incredible. Her energy is just, oh, my God, It's incredible.
FJ: She's endlessly brave. And for me, the thing that I think really stuck out for me was, I think I think it's in the third episode, third or fourth maybe, where she says, she said something about looking in the mirror, getting older, looking in the mirror and seeing her dad in her. Her dad from Piapot [Reserve, in the Qu’Appelle Valley, Saskatchewan].
She'll always say: “I had plane tickets. I had something that nobody else had, no other Indigenous people had at that time…I had plane tickets.” And I think so much of it is that like she doesn't seem like it was impossible to find out where she was living.
SH: What would you say was the biggest challenge you faced in making this piece?
FJ: I came into the world of podcasting and radio and audio pretty late in life in an unconventional sort of way. You know, I studied theater, and I always say I snuck in the back door of the CBC when someone was having a smoke and left the door open because I somehow ended up there and I was like, this is great…even if you have gone to school and you've studied and you've done it a lot like asking hard questions, you know? There's a lot of trauma in her story. And so you're aware of retraumatizing [during an interview, so I was] trying to do trauma-informed interviewing.
And so I had to overcome my own fears around asking some of those questions and like, you know, find an approach. I was lucky that I have some great Indigenous colleagues at the CBC who really helped me. It's really hard when you're put in a position and you're you're [also] the host of the show and you're one of the writers and one of the producers, and you're really trying to make this thing right, and please everyone. It's really hard to wear all of those hats.
And so for me, asking her about abuse from her brother, and how to approach that…asking her about all of those hard parts of her life…you know, how [do I] set that up with her? I felt really lucky again that I could lean on some people who could help me figure that stuff out because it was really I was really nervous about it. She was gracious and so willing to talk about it. I mean, she's talked about it before. It's not like I'm reinventing the wheel, but it's just I had to overcome my own discomfort with that.
SH: What came first, the scripting of the narration or the interviews? What was the order of operations?
FH: Interviews, all the interviews. And then so we got all the interviews with people who were involved in her life. It was sort of ongoing. We knew who we wanted, what the voices were for episode one, two, three, four, five…and then we knew we had archival that we could lean on if there were things in the interview that we wanted but we couldn't get from her. We could take that archival text and use it in our narrative.
I’m such an archival dork…but [those archives] really saved us a lot because we were trying to get things from her, and sometimes she just didn't want to talk about it.
It was really only episode three was the one where we really we had some back-and-forth on that one. But we did the smart thing [and] sent it to another senior producer who hadn't heard anything, who had no idea which cut was the top pick for what team….and he was the tiebreaker and he picked our side!
SH: So you've really made like ten episodes?
FJ: I don’t know….It was a lot though!
Mira [Burt-Wintonick, lead sound designer] was fantastic and mentored an Indigenous mixer, Nigel Irwin, because there aren’t many Indigenous mixers out there. It was a music podcast and we knew we needed that…and so, who's a Cree guy…he's also a musician. [Nigel] wrote the theme and [mixed] in other music.
But there's this one thing…episode three starts with the reintroduction of powwow into communities. And there's a line that's talking about Powwow regalia, and we say dresses that jingle. And he just put the slightest sound of a jingle dress in there.
SH: And I heard that. I love that sound.
FJ: I just died because it's like, that's the value! I think some people will know what it is, but for an Indigenous ear, it's like smoking a cigarette for your ears…there's something so deeply satisfying about just those little things. It makes you feel like the people who are making the thing really understand the story and really understand the person.
SH: Can you give me a sense of [who] the team was that you [worked with]?
FJ: So initially it was myself and Leah-Simone Bowen. The two of us started doing the research, [we] put together a pitch package. The CBC wanted to do it, but we knew we needed Buffy to sign on to it. So we put together a little package [and] sent it off. We got the thumbs up from her, from her team. And then we brought on Zoe Tennant, who I've worked with a number of times on different programs, and Eunice Kim, on chase.
Then Mira came on, at the same time as Nigel, and the two of them were working together [on sound]. When we were ready for them to start mixing things, they were there.
We had our senior producer, Tanya Springer, and then, you know, then there would be other people at the CBC who would listen, who flag anything, and let us know….But they really did let us stretch out. There was pushback, as there always is for this sort of stuff. But for me, some of that was really useful. It taught me about notes….I’m fine to take notes because I came from theatre, and I write, so I’m used to notes…
This project specifically made me start to think about notes…[ things] like: I don’t like this note; What is it about this note that's bothering me? And what can I learn from this [one]? Because this podcast, unlike some of the other work I've done, [CBC] wanted it [to have] more of a global reach, at least into the States.
But when you're telling Indigenous stories, you're always impacted by the colonized land that you stand on, right? And the history of colonization is different from place to place. And so you have to keep that in mind when you're trying to tell these stories in a broader way.
What does it mean to tell this story in Canada? What does it mean to tell it in the US? What does it mean to tell it in Australia or England or, you know, any number of places? And it changes because the words aren't the same, the language isn't the same.
So there were a couple of times when notes would kind of bother me and I really have to think about what it was. And where I usually landed was; Okay, well, if somebody is saying this, then this is what somebody thinks. And it's very likely that somebody else thinks this too. And so how do I satisfy myself in this?
There was one note about Buffy being followed, about being surveilled, being blacklisted. And there was a conversation one day … Could I even believe that that happened? Could I even believe, from where I sit now today, could I believe that that happened? That the government would be watching?
And I was like …. I have a status card. I have a card, with a number on it and my photo that's a certificate of my Indian Status. The government is always watching us. So then, taking that note and then flipping it that way … so then that's what ends up in the script is: It's the commonality. It's not the: Can you believe it?
SH: Near the end of the series, it's somewhere in episode five, you say:
“That’s the power that we hold.”
And you're kind of reflecting on Buffy's life and her status, as a symbol to Indigenous non-Indigenous, political activists...to everyone. But tell me more about what that means for you now, in the 6 or 8 months since this [podcast] has been [released]? What have you learned about what the power is that you hold? And what has this project done for that power?
FJ: Working on Buffy's life in podcast form gave it a level of intimacy that I don't think you necessarily see in a biopic. You know, like we thought a lot about Dolly Parton's America, while we were working on Buffy. The documentary that you watch on Dolly Parton is vastly different from the podcast that you'll hear … there's a vastly different level of intimacy for me in the work. It just feels like there's a different place to go. And so for me it's just an extension of storytelling, of Indigenous storytelling.
It’s been really interesting to be in the game, as long as I have [been], in this still pretty young media form, and to be able to tell stories in the way that we want to, in media, when media has been so tremendously damaging to us. Like I think about the first episode where we talk about Howdy Doody and the racism. There are so many young podcasters now out there who are telling our stories, [but] here's not enough of us! There's never enough of us!
But we're telling our stories in a way that we want to. And I think that Buffy is always told her story in the way that she wants to. And I feel like that's the thing. That's sort of the big takeaway that I took when I left this [project]: That we held true to the thing that we wanted to make, and we fought for it when we had to. And we did it with our ethics, which is the thing that is hard to hold on to, when you're making work like this. Your ethics can easily go by the wayside if you don't remind yourself. So I'm really proud of us for that.
SH: Yeah, I believe you. And I can imagine that, knowing the CBC, to be able to tell the story with the sharp tones that you did, couldn't have been easy. They [often want things that are] very pleasing. And sometimes it's so pleasing that it's kind of margarine. But you kept the rock and roll in there.
Buffy says something at the end which has stuck with me: [she said] “Oh, come on, don't be so serious! Just go off and have fun!” So…kudos, because I think the spirit of this podcast really is her spirit.
FJ: Yeah, I think so….she's definitely a hard interview, because she'll be like, ‘I don't want to talk about that’ or like, ‘nobody wants to hear about that.’
And she's 82, and who the hell am I to tell her what her story is like? Who the hell am I? She's never listened. She told me on Wednesday, she's like, I haven't listened to it. And I'm like, That's okay…I'm not gonna tell you your business. Two biographies, multiple documentaries about her…I can't imagine. I mean, I hope she listens to it. But what if she hates it? It's scary!